First Visit to Roundstone. 213 



CHAPTER XXX. 



FIRST VISIT TO ROUNDSTONE. 



[1869.] 



IN July he went on an expedition to Roundstone, where 

 he spent a month dredging- and collecting. He had long 

 looked forward to visiting this part of Connemara, which, 

 in spite of its remoteness and difficulty of access 

 having no railway station within fifty miles boasted an 

 almost unrivalled record in the chronicles of Irish natural 

 history. For Roundstone was emphatically the land of 

 discovery. Here was the place where Erica mediterranea 

 had been first detected as an Irish heath by Dr. Mackay 

 in 1830; where also the heath named in Dr. Mackay's 

 honour, Erica mackaiana, had been discovered by the local 

 self-taught naturalist William M'Calla ; where, unless 

 some singular mistake had been committed, a third re- 

 markable heath, Erica ciliaris, had twice been gathered on 

 Irish soil by botanists visiting Connemara; where the 

 delicate lake-plant, Naias flexilis, discovered by Professor 

 Oliver in 1850, had still its only known locality in the 

 British Islands ; where M'Calla had found those remarkable 

 " nullipores " unknown elsewhere in British waters, Litho- 

 thamnion fasciculatum and Lithothamnion agariciforme ; 

 where Professor Harvey, to his delight, had obtained the 

 equally interesting alga, Peysonellia borealis, new as a 

 species to science and as a genus to Britain. Among the 

 Crustacea and other forms of marine life Roundstone had 

 also proved fertile in rarities ; in fact the vicinity of the 

 little fishing hamlet was, as it still is, a happy hunting- 

 ground to explorers in nearly every section of biology. 



But apart from its general celebrity, Roundstone 

 possessed one other association which greatly increased 

 its attractiveness to Mr. More. No part of the correspon- 

 dence of his early years had been more carefully treasured 



